E M Forster: A New Life by Wendy Moffat; Concerning E M Forster by Frank Kermode - review by John Sutherland

John Sutherland

Coarser Connections

E M Forster: A New Life

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Bloomsbury 416pp £25 order from our bookshop

Concerning E M Forster

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Weidenfeld & Nicolson 180pp £14.99 order from our bookshop
 

Jane Austen went to the grave a virgin, leaving six full-length novels behind her. Would those novels have been better had Miss Austen had as lively a sex life as, say, slutty Lydia Bennet?

E M Forster was a virgin until the age of thirty-nine, when he had his first ‘full’ sexual experience (a ‘hurried sucking off’, Wendy Moffat informs us) with a passing soldier on a beach in Alexandria.

By that point, five of Forster’s six novels were written and the last, A Passage to India, drafted. Until he was thirty, with much of his oeuvre behind him, he did not, he later confessed, ‘know exactly how male and female joined’. ‘Muddle and mystery’ between the sheets

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